Data driven businesses increasingly are dependent on a wider variety and amount of data derived or accessed from multiple disparate sources and networks. Significant challenges exist with integrating complex and sophisticated information technology solutions in order to perform large-scale transactional data management while maintaining data quality and access. Advanced intelligence and analytics are needed to help businesses understand and make use of complex data for effective and reliable decision making.
Small and medium size businesses span a wide range of business types, and involve a wide range of business risks and risk characteristics, making it difficult to generate and analyze information to produce rating and pricing policies that can be reliably and consistently applied to different businesses in different geographical locations.
The rating and pricing of business owner's policies is complex, and is made particularly complex by the wide range of different types and classes of businesses. Rating and pricing is made even more complex by the different geographical, demographic and even environmental conditions that are relevant to the risk of loss for different businesses. For example, certain areas of the U.S. present higher loss risks due to catastrophic conditions such as hurricanes or floods. As another example, certain areas present higher loss risks due to theft. Current rating and pricing systems do not adequately take such territorial variations into consideration when pricing and evaluating business owner's policies.
In addition to business owner's policy coverage, certain types of businesses may be interested in professional liability insurance. For example, a professional public speaker might be interest in obtaining insurance against the risk being accused of making slanderous or libelous statements. Similarly, an accounting or auditing service might be interested in obtaining insurance again the risk of being accused of misconduct. Different types of businesses, however, can be associated with different types of professional liability risks, and determining an appropriate premium value for such insurance can be a time consuming task (especially when underwriting determinations are not begun until after the business owner's policy coverage is calculated).
It would be desirable to provide systems and methods for rating and pricing insurance policies which achieve faster, better rate and pricing specificity and flexibility. It would further be desirable to provide established base rates by coverage, amount of insurance relativities, territories or geographical location. It would be further desirable to provide systems and methods that allow existing agent systems and processes to quickly and efficiently price and quote business owner insurance policies, including professional liability coverage, using the improved rating and pricing systems.